“I—what? That’s not—”
He scoffs, waving aside my objections. “I’ve seen it a million times. Charlotte’s a bit different, I’ll grant you, since she was a child star. She didn’t have the same types of friends to bring along with her at the time. But when she took time off, it gave her the opportunity to collect them. So you’re one of those. It’s fine. All of the starlets bring along some of their friends from their former life.” He leans forward like he’s about to share a confidence. “It never lasts, though. I’m sure you’re aware. Your lives are too different. So you want to get what you can while you can. I get it. I’m sure that’s what makes Brendan appealing too.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” My voice is low, and I hate that it’s trembling, because I’m sure he’ll mistake the reason behind it. It’s born of fury. Rage. Indignation. Not fear.
He smirks, and I want to slap that condescending look off his face. “Don’t you? Come on. Brendan’s a promising young producer. His contributions as an intern propelled some of my biggest hits. He’s going places. I’ll do what I can to keep him with me for as long as possible. But he’ll eventually strike out on his own. And when he does, he’ll take the world by storm. Mark my words.”
He scoots his rolling chair even closer, latching onto the arm of my chair and pulling me right next to him. “But he won’t be able to take you with him. You’ll hold him back.”
“What are you talking about?”
He tsks, shaking his head. “For one thing, a large part of his appeal to young, female clients has been his status as a single man. Being available to date them will only help his meteoric rise. And that’s to say nothing of the bad press you’re bringing to his door.”
I swallow past the painful lump in my throat at the mention of the media attention I’ve been getting. “But none of it’s true.” I barely manage to get the words out above a whisper.
The Professor looks down at me like I’m stupid. Naive and foolish. “You think that matters? And please, you’re telling me that a beautiful girl like you was a virgin on your wedding night?”
My cheeks heat, the tips of my ears blazing. “That’s—”
He shakes his head again. “Of course not. Even if the stories are exaggerated, they can’t be entirely false. And no matter what he might’ve told you, it’s not going to go away. Those stories last forever. He might’ve married you in some drunken farce of a wedding in Las Vegas—proposing in the middle of a bar, for god’s sake—but that can’t save you. He can’t save you. He can’t save your reputation. And you’ll drag him down like an anchor if you stay.” Sitting back, he waves a hand around. “As cool as all this is, and I built it, so I’m allowed to say so—this isn’t what you want, is it? You’re a college student. A violinist from Bumfuck, Washington.” I open my mouth to protest, but can’t get any words out. He shakes his head yet again, this time sadly. And I feel every bit the naive and foolish girl he sees me as. “Go home, Lauren. Leave Brendan alone. Let him climb to greatness. Watch from the sidelines if you like. Cheer him on from your quiet little life with your quiet music and your quiet soul. But let him achieve his destiny. If you stay with him, there’s no way he can do that.”
After dropping that bomb, he stands. “I’ll give you some time to think over my words. Stay here. Tiffany will come and show you the way back to Brendan’s office.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Brendan
I glare at the door as The Professor pulls it closed, trapping me in his office, and my wife on the other side with him.
I don’t know what he’s up to, but I know it can’t be good.
Grinding my teeth, I focus on the computer screen in front of me, scanning The Professor’s notes on the project so far and what the client wants.
It’s always the client. He never tells me who I’m working for until after the project is done. Says it’s so I don’t give my best work only to the famous clients but treat everyone equally.
The truth is that it’s because he’s a controlling egomaniac. That’s why he shanghaied Lauren, too.
The sooner I get through this and come up with a plan, the sooner we can get home.
I glance at the clock when the door opens. Fifteen minutes have elapsed. I’m almost done here, and then we can get the fuck out of here. I need at least twenty-four hours to recover from the collective shit from today. We’ll hole up at my place, order takeout, and spend the rest of the weekend naked. We can face the next week when the time comes. And The Professor can suck it if he thinks I’m going to start working on this before Monday.
When I glance up, I’m surprised to only see The Professor sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of his desk. He’s relaxed, his legs crossed, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair, his fingers steepled in front of his mouth as he watches me work. Kinda creepy there, dude.
Setting the headphones on the desk, I stand, staring him down. “Where’s Lauren?”
He spreads his hands. “If she’s not already waiting in your office, she should be soon. We had a nice chat, and then I left her with Tiffany for the remainder of the tour.”
Grinding my teeth, I step around the desk. “What did you chat about?” I doubt he’ll actually tell me, but it’s worth trying to find out what his game was.
He waves a hand dismissively. “This and that. Life. Marriage. Future plans. The usual get-to-know-you topics.”
I snort. I can’t help it. I can imagine how well that went. I don’t want to prolong this anymore than necessary though. “Sounds great. Hope you enjoyed it.”
“Hmm. Yes. It was … educational, to say the least. I hope Lauren found it so as well.”
Narrowing my eyes, I look him over, but he doesn’t give anything away. “I’ll let you know.” Ha. Right.
He inclines his head, accepting that at face value. “Any questions about the project?”
I shake my head, moving to the door. “Nope. I’ll get started on it first thing Monday.”
He stands, turning to face me. “Now Brendan—”
I hold up a hand to cut him off. “Monday. I’m taking the weekend off. That’s what normal people do, you know. They close their offices on the weekends. They don’t hire a weekend receptionist.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but I leave before he can. I don’t care what he has to say. And I don’t care about keeping him happy right now. I care about getting to Lauren and doing my best to mitigate whatever damage he may have done alone with her.
I don’t know what he might’ve said that she’d find “educational,” but whatever it is, it can’t be good.
I walk quickly down the hall to my office, just shy of jogging. When I open my door, though, she’s not there. I spin in a circle, taking in the room, as though there’ll be some clue where she is. Or she’ll pop out of the corner and say, “Surprise!” I don’t know.
I’m worried and frustrated, and she’s lost somewhere in this maze of a place.
Grabbing the door handle, I yank it open … to find a surprised Lauren jumping back on the other side.
She clutches her heaving chest with one hand, her eyes wide. “Brendan. You scared me.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.” I step into the hall and take hold of her shoulders, running my hands down her arms as though I’m checking her for injuries. “I was just coming to find you.”
She gives me a weak smile, and that’s when I notice that her stricken face. “Here I am.”
Glancing around, I see Tiffany disappearing around a corner. By all appearances we’re alone. I desperately want to know what he said to her. But I’m not sure having this conversation here is a good idea. Instead I pull the door shut behind me and lock it with my key, then take her hand in mine. Her fingers are limp and cold, and I give them a squeeze, earning myself another wan smile. “Let’s go home.”
She looks down and away, her hair falling forward and blocking her face, but she nods.
Arriving back at my apartmen
t, we more or less do what I wanted, ordering pizza, bingeing on Netflix, lazing around and doing nothing. But something’s shifted. Changed.
Lauren’s laughter is muted, harder to draw out. Her smiles are pale imitations of the real thing. She’s withdrawn, burrowed deep into herself, and she won’t let me in.
I chalk it up to the stress of the day and let it go, contenting myself with holding her, hoping the contact will provide enough reassurance for her to bounce back tomorrow.
But tomorrow is more of the same. Stilted conversation reminiscent of our phone calls before she called me on my lack of effort, except we’re face to face. I hate it, but I don’t know what to do about it. I want to shake her and tell her to quit blocking me out, but I feel like she’d just blink up at me and calmly ask what I mean. She’s impenetrable when she wants to be, and all I can do is sit out in the cold and wait for her to invite me back in.
She spends a chunk of Sunday afternoon practicing in the bedroom. I sit in the living room, my computer on my lap, open but ignored as I listen to her. Her practice time seems to be divided into neat chunks, only obvious to me by the change in what she’s playing. The first things are simple, obviously warm-up exercises, but performed with the relentless devotion to perfection with which she pursues everything else. It’s all very controlled, even when she gets to the real music. She spends endless minutes repeating the same notes over and over until she’s satisfied and moves on to a new group. It’s exhausting just listening to her. Not because there’s anything wrong with her playing, but because of the mental discipline it represents.
When she’s done, I expect her to come out and collapse on the couch with me, but she doesn’t. Not exactly. She gives me a wan smile as she crosses the room, bringing a bottle of water with her. She curls into the corner of the couch, downing half the bottle, barely sparing me a glance.
“Good practice?” I ask when she’s capped the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
She shrugs. “It was fine.”
I stare at her for a beat, but she looks down at her fingers, examining her nails like they hold the answers to the unanswerable questions of the universe. That’s all I’m getting from her for now. With a sigh, I pick up the remote and turn on the TV. “Want to watch something?”
“Sure. Whatever you want is fine.”
Gritting my teeth, I flick through the options and pick something.
I hate this. I don’t know what’s wrong, so I can’t fix it, and she won’t talk to me anymore.
What the fuck happened yesterday?
And how the fuck can I get us back to where we were last week?
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lauren
The next two days are pure torture. Brendan’s frustrated with me, but I don’t know what to do. I never in a million years thought that I would be a hindrance to Brendan’s career. I’ve succeeded in pushing aside my doubts about how exactly we’ll make things work the longer we’re forced to be apart, but that conversation with The Professor brings them all to the forefront of my mind.
What were we thinking?
While it wasn’t quite the drunken farce of a wedding that The Professor called it—yes, we’d had some alcohol, but we were both clear-headed by the time we went back to the wedding chapel. It was still impulsive. I’ve already thought the timing was awful, that we should’ve waited, taken more time, had a plan.
What can we do about it now?
The Professor’s words echo in my mind on a loop, making me doubt every decision we’ve made up till now. You’ll drag him down. Prevent him from reaching his potential. Do you want that on your conscience? Could you live with yourself knowing what he could’ve been and knowing that you’re the one who kept him from it?
The thought of leaving him guts me, hollows me out and makes me feel sick. My despair is palpable, and I know Brendan can feel it. He’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, but I can’t tell him. Not until I can figure out my own mind.
On Monday morning Brendan and I get up like normal, eating a quiet breakfast together before he kisses me and leaves to go to the studio to work on whatever his latest project is.
I consider calling Gabby to get her take on the situation, but I already know what she’d say. Ignore him. He’s an asshole. You’re happy with Brendan.
And she’s right, I am. And he is an asshole. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He has more experience with this life than I do. Than Brendan does, even. If he says that I’ll just drag Brendan down, I can’t completely brush that aside.
The thought of being the one responsible for keeping him from living up to his potential makes me as sick as the thought of leaving. And so I’m suspended in indecision, paralyzed, not knowing where to turn.
Needing a distraction from my swirling thoughts, I open my laptop and scroll through my emails. I’ve stopped forcing myself to wait till the end of the day, instead doing it while Brendan’s away. There haven’t been as many mentions of me lately. So maybe The Professor was wrong. Maybe Brendan knew what he was talking about when he said that the media would get bored with us and move on to someone else.
That spark of relief and hope is quickly extinguished, though. There’s a new alert on my name. Clicking the link, I hold my breath as I scan the article, but that doesn’t stop the tears from welling up and spilling down my cheeks again.
It’s awful. More of the same, really. A theme and variations on me as gold digger, slut, fame seeker. Lies. All of it, from start to finish. But it doesn’t matter.
The reality is that people will believe this. They’ll believe that I only became friends with Gabby after she started dating Jonathan. That I tried to steal him from her. That I managed to stay in her good graces so I could finagle an introduction to Charlotte James, attaching myself to her next and scoring free trips and a free place to stay. And when I couldn’t have Jonathan, setting my sights on Brendan, who still occasionally performs with his more famous older brother and is now a promising young music producer.
Me, the grasping siren, luring the rich and famous to their collective doom. There’s speculation that I’m only with him as a stepping stone, biding my time until I can bag myself someone more famous.
The sources are all anonymous. The paper is barely a step above The Weekly World News, that tabloid that I used to see at the grocery store as a kid with headlines about Batboy running for president.
And yet, it’s already starting to spread like wildfire. People tweeting about it, retweeting it, leaving comments about what a slut I am.
Gasping for air, I slam the computer shut, the dining room chair skidding backward across the tile as I stand in a rush.
This is never going to end. I’ll always be a gold-digging whore. A slut. A social climber, sinking my claws into whoever I can latch onto. And that will drag Brendan down.
The Professor was right. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true. That won’t stop them from repeating it over and over and over again. Everyone already believes it as it is.
There’s only one option. One way to stop this from destroying both of our lives forever.
I have to go.
I can’t keep doing this. To either of us.
I have to go.
Chapter Forty
Brendan
Lauren doesn’t respond to my text asking what she wants for dinner before I leave the studio. The Professor might want me to spend every waking moment here and sleep here while working on a project, but he can fuck right off with that shit. I’ll do that when Lauren’s gone, but while she’s here? Nope. Not gonna happen. I’m spending as much time as I can with her while I can. That asshole’s lucky I didn’t just take the two weeks off.
And now more than ever, I’m anxious to get home to her. Maybe she’s taking a nap. She was tossing and turning last night. Or maybe she’s practicing. She doesn’t usually respond to her phone right away when she’s in the zone.
But when I get to the apartment, everything’s
quiet. The lights are off. “Lauren?” I shut the door quietly behind me, stepping inside. “Lauren, you okay?” I poke my head into the bedroom, but no one’s there. Scanning the room, my gaze snags on the music stand in the corner.
It’s empty.
I borrowed it from my parents’ house before Lauren came down, knowing she’d want to practice. It’s been covered in sheet music since she got here, her violin case tucked between it and the wall.
But it’s empty. No music. No case.
Crossing the room in three large strides, I yank open the closet door. Only my boring clothes greet me. The bathroom, which had her hair brush and makeup and whatever tubes of products she uses clustered in the corner of the countertop, is empty.
She’s gone.
Rubbing my hands on my face, I take in the evidence of her desertion.
What the fuck?
Yanking out my phone, I try calling but it goes straight to voicemail. Forcing a deep breath, I leave a message. “Hey. Where are you? All your stuff is gone. What the fuck is going on?” I wasn’t going to curse, but it slips out before I can call it back. Ending the call, I resist the urge to hurl my phone at the wall as hard as I can. If she calls back, I need to be able to answer. I can’t do that if I break my phone in a fit of rage.
Shaking from the effort of restraining myself from tearing the place apart, I stalk back toward the kitchen. I don’t know what I’m looking for—what I’m hoping for—but given that there’s nothing in the bedroom, it seems like the next likely place.
Jackpot. So to speak.
A torn scrap of paper sits on the table, a single line scrawled across it. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.
That’s it? I can’t do this. I’m sorry? That’s fucking it?
Reverb (Songs and Sonatas Book 7) Page 22